On Wednesday morning, Hardik Patel's lawyer said he had contacted him on SMS and told him he was in Halwad, about 155 km from Ahmedabad.
Armed men had abducted him and held him captive overnight in a car, alleged Hardik Patel as he surfaced on Wednesday evening, many hours after a Gujarat court ordered the state government to produce him by Thursday.
The Gujarat High Court issued its order at 2.30 in the night after lawyers of the 22-year-old politician filed a petition alleging that he had been illegally detained the police on Tuesday.
The state police denied that and said Hardik Patel had fled in a vehicle on Tuesday when they tried to detain him for holding a large public meeting in a village in north Gujarat without permission. They arrested 13 of his associates, one of whom Nilesh Patel, has been charged with sedition over Facebook posts.
On Wednesday morning, Hardik Patel's lawyer said his client had contacted him on SMS and told him he was in Halwad, about 155 km from Ahmedabad.
But Mr Patel was not found in Halwad. He finally surfaced in Viramgam, about 60 km from Ahmedabad and shared details about his alleged abduction by unidentified men. "They threatened me to stop organising protest rallies," he said, adding that he would head to the Gujarat High Court and inform it too about the alleged incident.
Mr Hardik's lawyer had said yesterday, "There is no trace of Hardik and we do not know where he is. We later got to know that he was being threatened for the past two days by the state government and their supporters. They were asking him to end the protest."
Hardik Patel is the face of a massive agitation by the politically influential Patel community for quota in government jobs and colleges in Gujarat.
Last month, he was briefly detained after a massive rally in Ahmedabad, which led to violence in many of Gujarat's cities including Ahmedabad and Surat.
He was arrested on Saturday last, after he attempted to hold a protest rally in Surat for which he did not have permission.